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Last week at this time, me and my rowing partner had 5 hours left of rowing in our 24 hour tandem row. Every 20 minutes we switched and by the end maintained a 2:22 pace and rowed 302,928 meters. This exhausting daywas all to help raise money for my good friend, Roby Quintela who was recently diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma and has began his chemo treatment.

The row wasn’t easy, as a matter of fact, there was about an hour of throwing up (maybe a bad reaction to pedialite) where I ALMOST questioned my ability to go on. But honestly, the thought of quitting was more nauseating than anything else. I was reminded by JC’s (my rowing partner) wife that chemo probably felt the same way. Nausea with the inability to eat, yeah, there was no way I was going to quit now.

The most fascinating part of the row is the amount of support from our community in and out of OTL Fitness. We had 70 other people jump on rowers in the gym throughout the day and in total, our guests/supporters rowed a little over 840,000 meters! We also raised a bunch of money for Roby as well.

This 24 hours experience was amazing. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner and I would do anything from my Quintela Family in El Paso.

If you haven’t pushed your physical limits lately, I suggest you give it a try. Go do something that others wouldn’t, the end result is very rewarding! Roby, kick the shit out of cancer. We all have your back.

Sometimes it is really funny to think about when this fitness stuff got real for me. Because in my mind it was just yesterday, but in reality it was 2008. I was living in Bryan, Texas, going to Blinn Jr. College, living with some buddies from high school and having the time of my life. But, I knew I was all in when I started baking PVC pipes in our kitchen…

Ring work, dips, muscle ups, mostly, were getting mainstream and I just had to have a pair of gymnastic rings. Unfortunately, unlike today, they weren’t as easy to find. So my roommate and I googled our way into finding out how to turn PVC pipes into gymnastic rings. I wish I still had the PDF file saved, but that was many computers ago. It was a 1 time shot, and we nailed it. He was in the fire academy at the time so obviously he knew how to tie bad ass knots, and that he did. We hung those suckers up in the back yard, and the rest is history!

At the time I was a trainer at the Texas A&M Recreational Center. About 5 months in my boss was not having my unconventional ways of training (AKA something other than using machines at the gym) and I quit and started training folks out of my garage. To say the least, it was AWESOME! I don’t know if you could call it a passion or not, but guiding others through the things I loved to do was just an incredible job and I feel very grateful to still be doing it to this day.

OTL Fitness is very unconventional, it is cold in the winter with no heat and hot in the summer with no A/C. But that is how I have always gone about my training. Check out the photo above. That is me at about 20 years old in the backyard of the second house I lived in while in college. We trained in the back, on the ground in the heat, rain, and cold. I love and still love it to this day.

Our pull up bar was a chain I attached on one tree, then ran a pipe through it and attached the chain to another tree. Every time you did a pull up, the trees would fold together. It made pull ups SO DIFFICULT!

Yesterday (1/25/2015) I ran my first half marathon. My final thoughts are like so: I had a great time and the amount of people there (7,000 runners) was amazing! What I didn’t like was Continue reading →